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Elected to his garden to assist him.

      Envoy and servant sooth he seemed of Christ,

       For the first love made manifest in him

       Was the first counsel that was given by Christ.

      Silent and wakeful many a time was he

       Discovered by his nurse upon the ground,

       As if he would have said, 'For this I came.'

      O thou his father, Felix verily!

       O thou his mother, verily Joanna,

       If this, interpreted, means as is said!

      Not for the world which people toil for now

       In following Ostiense and Taddeo,

       But through his longing after the true manna,

      He in short time became so great a teacher,

       That he began to go about the vineyard,

       Which fadeth soon, if faithless be the dresser;

      And of the See, (that once was more benignant

       Unto the righteous poor, not through itself,

       But him who sits there and degenerates,)

      Not to dispense or two or three for six,

       Not any fortune of first vacancy,

       'Non decimas quae sunt pauperum Dei,'

      He asked for, but against the errant world

       Permission to do battle for the seed,

       Of which these four and twenty plants surround thee.

      Then with the doctrine and the will together,

       With office apostolical he moved,

       Like torrent which some lofty vein out-presses;

      And in among the shoots heretical

       His impetus with greater fury smote,

       Wherever the resistance was the greatest.

      Of him were made thereafter divers runnels,

       Whereby the garden catholic is watered,

       So that more living its plantations stand.

      If such the one wheel of the Biga was,

       In which the Holy Church itself defended

       And in the field its civic battle won,

      Truly full manifest should be to thee

       The excellence of the other, unto whom

       Thomas so courteous was before my coming.

      But still the orbit, which the highest part

       Of its circumference made, is derelict,

       So that the mould is where was once the crust.

      His family, that had straight forward moved

       With feet upon his footprints, are turned round

       So that they set the point upon the heel.

      And soon aware they will be of the harvest

       Of this bad husbandry, when shall the tares

       Complain the granary is taken from them.

      Yet say I, he who searcheth leaf by leaf

       Our volume through, would still some page discover

       Where he could read, 'I am as I am wont.'

      'Twill not be from Casal nor Acquasparta,

       From whence come such unto the written word

       That one avoids it, and the other narrows.

      Bonaventura of Bagnoregio's life

       Am I, who always in great offices

       Postponed considerations sinister.

      Here are Illuminato and Agostino,

       Who of the first barefooted beggars were

       That with the cord the friends of God became.

      Hugh of Saint Victor is among them here,

       And Peter Mangiador, and Peter of Spain,

       Who down below in volumes twelve is shining;

      Nathan the seer, and metropolitan

       Chrysostom, and Anselmus, and Donatus

       Who deigned to lay his hand to the first art;

      Here is Rabanus, and beside me here

       Shines the Calabrian Abbot Joachim,

       He with the spirit of prophecy endowed.

      To celebrate so great a paladin

       Have moved me the impassioned courtesy

       And the discreet discourses of Friar Thomas,

      And with me they have moved this company."

      XIII. Of the Wisdom of Solomon. St. Thomas reproaches Dante's Judgement.

       Table of Contents

      Let him imagine, who would well conceive

       What now I saw, and let him while I speak

       Retain the image as a steadfast rock,

      The fifteen stars, that in their divers regions

       The sky enliven with a light so great

       That it transcends all clusters of the air;

      Let him the Wain imagine unto which

       Our vault of heaven sufficeth night and day,

       So that in turning of its pole it fails not;

      Let him the mouth imagine of the horn

       That in the point beginneth of the axis

       Round about which the primal wheel revolves,—

      To have fashioned of themselves two signs in heaven,

       Like unto that which Minos' daughter made,

       The moment when she felt the frost of death;

      And one to have its rays within the other,

       And both to whirl themselves in such a manner

       That one should forward go, the other backward;

      And he will have some shadowing forth of that

       True constellation and the double dance

       That circled round the point at which I was;

      Because it is as much beyond our wont,

       As swifter than the motion of the Chiana

       Moveth the heaven that all the rest outspeeds.

      There sang they neither Bacchus, nor Apollo,

       But in the divine nature Persons three,

       And in one person the divine and human.

      The singing and the dance fulfilled their measure,

       And unto us those holy lights gave need,

       Growing in happiness from care to care.

      Then broke the silence of those saints concordant

       The light in which the admirable life

       Of God's own mendicant was told to me,

      And said: "Now that one straw is trodden out

       Now that its seed is garnered up already,

       Sweet love invites me to thresh out the other.

      Into that bosom, thou believest, whence

       Was drawn the rib to form the beauteous cheek

      

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